Friedrich Miescher

Friedrich Miescher (13 August 1844-26 August 1895) was a Swiss physician who was the first researcher to isolate nucleic acid.

Biography
Friedrich Miescher was born in Basel, Switzerland in 1844, and he followed in his family's scientific tradition by becoming a physician. In 1869, at the University of Tubingen, he decided to study pus in bacterial infections, and he became the first personal to isolate nucleic acid. He found that the precipitate in cells was made of phosphorus and nitrogen, and he called it nuclein; this would later be identified as DNA. His study was published in 1871, but its significance was not initially apparent. He died of tuberculosis in 1895 at the age of 51.